Tech companies know everything about me – so why do they try to sell me so much rubbish? | Joel Snape

No, Amazon, I do not want to buy another version of the thing I just bought, or any other random object I don’t recognise or understand

We live, as I’m sure someone’s chief growth officer has recently boasted on an earnings call, in a golden age for data capture. Jeff Bezos knows what I buy, read and watch; Mark Zuckerberg will be aware that I recently sold a car transport box for a medium-sized dog. I’ve been ruthlessly conditioned into clicking Accept All Cookies every time I want to check how much cumin my favourite chilli needs, and I simply accept that my washing machine is probably spying on me.

All of which raises the obvious question: with all of these terabytes of personal information available, why can’t advertisers try to sell me something I might actually like? Every time I swipe open my Kindle, for instance, I dismiss an advert for a bestselling trilogy called something like Ruthless Faerie Werewolves or Evil Mafia Hunk, even though I have never once – in my life – read a book where the main character could be described as a “morally grey shadow daddy”. I stopped watching Stranger Things after one season, and yet Netflix, which should know this better than anyone, has suggested the stage-play version to me so many times that I can recite its ad from memory. Amazon seems to have given up on predicting my needs and advertises the same one-off purchases that I’ve just bought, while Reddit and X want me to buy software products that I genuinely don’t understand.

Part of me is heartened by this: maybe I’m too dazzlingly individual to be defined by the things I click on. Another part is saddened: what would be better, after all, than being bombarded with recommendations for the sort of books I can never find enough of (micro-histories of things like cod, say, or AK-47s, or 19th-century navigation).

But a tiny part of me is desperately worried that the algorithm really does know me better than I know myself, and that I’m denying myself by refusing to heed its call. I’ll let you know, just as soon as I’m done with Mean Pixie Mob Daddy.